New Macs don’t ship with Adobe’s Flash player plugin. Why? Apple’s hot selling iPhone and iPad won’t play Adobe Flash video player. Why?
The Proprietary vs. Open Irony
It wasn’t that long ago when Adobe and Apple threw mud balls at each other over Flash. For Adobe, it’s a popular tool, and the Flash plugin and video format was the de facto way to stream video over the internet.
For Apple, Flash was a thorn in the side, a proprietary relic, a crash-happy reminder of when Adobe’s love hate relationship. Apple shunned Flash and adopted HTML5 as the once and future king of web media standards.
Adobe fumed and fussed, but, in the end, business tends to be pragmatic (remember, Apple accepted a $150-million investment from Microsoft back in the late 1990s). Adobe moved on and embraced Apple’s successes with more products, including video and audio editing apps for the Mac, an improved version of the Flash plugin for the Mac, and a suite of tools designed to move forward the dream of HTML5.
First, it was Adobe Edge, a motion and interaction design tool for animation. Specifically, HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS 3. Then, it was Adobe Muse, an iWeb-like website creation tool.
Neither are mature tools, both are available as free Preview apps. The irony is two-fold. The first, is that Adobe is moving beyond Flash and embracing non-proprietary, open standards such as HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS 3.0.
The second irony has to do with Edge, which is a standalone Mac app, and Muse, which requires Adobe’s Air platform to run on Mac or Windows. Why the different platforms? Why not put both on Air? Or, make both standalone apps?
Adobe AIR is Adobe Integrated Runtime, a cross-platform runtime environment to help create rich internet apps which use Adobe Flash, and other technologies. Write once, run everywhere—Mac or Windows.
Adobe makes money by selling content creation tools, so it’s understandable that the company, albeit reluctantly, embraced HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS 3.0 in the latest tool sets. But Adobe cannot seem to make up its collective mind about how to deploy those new tools, whether as standalone apps, or apps which reside on proprietary platforms.
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